‘Altered Carbon’ on Netflix Episode 7 Recap: The Weakness Of Weapons

Last year, Stranger Things threw its own fandom into an ’80s nostalgia-fueled frenzy with its second season episode “The Lost Sister,” a stand-alone hour that took the action away from Hawkins, Indiana, interrupting the main storyline right at an emotional climax while also severely overestimating how much time we’d want to spend with characters we just met who looked like extras in an Off-Broadway production of Green Day’s American Idiot.

Altered Carbon‘s “Nora Inu”—written by Nevin Densham & Casey Fisher, and directed by Andy Goddard—takes a lot of the same chances that “The Lost Sister” did. It drops in the same seventh episode slot. It interrupts the main storyline, right after the emotional climax of “Man With My Face,” to spend time with a few characters we just met who…honestly also look like extras in an Off-Broadway production of Green Day’s American Idiot. Hell, even the titles are similar; translated from Japanese, “Nora Inu” means “Stray Dog.”

But here’s the thing: “Nora Inu” succeeds on almost every level on which “The Lost Sister” failed.

This comes down almost exclusively to the strength of the performances, which overcome even the episode’s lamest Matrix Reloaded-ass philosophizing. “Nora Inu” details, through flashback, the origin of Takeshi Kovacs—from fearsome CTAC officer to Envoy revolutionary to the sole known survivor of the Battle of Stronghold—during the period of his life in which the character is played by Will Yun Lee. Simply put, Lee is a more dynamic, charismatic presence than Joel Kinnaman. Where Kinnaman’s Kovacs is dry to the point of indifference, Lee wears the pain of a couple long-lived lives on his face even when he’s having a good time.

We learn that Kovacs killed his abusive, murderous father when he was just a boy. The crime got his sister, Reileen, sold to the Yakuza and himself recruited by the Colonial Tactical Assault Corps, who military trained “every evolved violence-limitation instinct in the human psyche” from his head, leaving behind only “the conscious will to do harm.” That will, however, extends only so far as the sister he lost so many years ago, who Kovacs reunites with on a standard CTAC extermination mission.

The scene is a straight delight, as far as any blood-filled shootout between corrupt soldiers and the Yakuza can be a delight. The look of mutual, wordless understanding that passes between Kovacs and Reileen,—the glance that just screams “are we about to straight murder all our allies?”—is so heartwarming they might as well have left afterward to do karate in the garage.

But the episode—which clocks in at a length hour and six minutes—really takes flight once Kovacs and Reileen, now both fugitives, are taken in by Quellcrist Falconer and her band of revolutionaries. And not just because their woodland hideout is a welcome break from the endlessly raining neon dreariness of Ridley Scott wet dream Bay City.

Renée Elise Goldsberry is, to use a technical television critique term, the baddest of asses as Falconer; she inverts the fluid grace that won her a Tony for Hamilton into the physicality of a living weapon you believe could take down two Envoys without a weapon in her hand. We’ve so far gotten glimpses of Falconer through brief flashback and hallucination, but learn more about the rebellion leader here. A lot more.

First of all, Quellcrist Falconer is not Quellcrist Falconer at all. Her real name is Nadia Makita, a scientist who invented cortical stacks and effectively beat death. The achievement haunts her; she created the most innovative technology in all of history and then watched the worst humanity had to offer use it for their own selfish needs, like the person who invented Youtube watching a Logan Paul video. “Eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control for those who can’t,” she tells Kovacs. “Stop looking at me like I’m a hero. Because I am not.”

But she had a plan to “fix” everything, depending on your view of re-introducing the idea of death to several billion unwilling participants. Quellcrist engineered a program called Acheron, which she planned to inject into a Central Core, where it would flood to every colony in the galaxy and establish a 100-year time limit to the human lifespan. Goldsberry delivers this plan with such gusto, you almost don’t realize the writers are asking you to simply accept the fact Falconer manufactured Acheron in the middle of the woods and that it would totally work.

It’s almost a shame that all this is so interesting—and that Lee and Goldsberry have such intense chemistry—because we know the entire time that this ends in slaughter. With Kovacs and Falconer sleeping off a romantic tryst and Reileen angrily wandering the woods, CTAC uses a bio-weapon called the Rawling Virus that effectively drives the Envoy revolutionaries insane enough to kill each other. Only Falconer and Naileen reach an escape craft, leaving Kovacs on the ground to watch the two women he loves triumphantly escape…right before they’re blown out of the sky.

Which brings us back to the present, where Reileen—who claims she was re-sleeved after the fiery explosion by a “pencil-neck archaeology student working on his dissertation”—clearly has a few things to hide. In classic Altered Carbon fashion, it’s incredibly hard to tell at first glance what exactly those things are.

Because Reileen definitely says she can’t remember the last moments before she and Falconer died. But we are also definitely shown Reileen betraying Falconer in those final seconds. And Reileen—who, again, said she doesn’t remember this—then tells Kovacs exactly what she told Falconer right before CTAC rocketed them out of the air: “They gave me life.”

A lot to take in there, and that’s without the last-second mind-fuckery of Kovacs, still sick from his fight against Reaper, discovering some familiar-faced clones in Reileen’s storage area. Hemingway, the man supposedly pulling the Ghostwalker’s strings. The Meth from Bancroft’s party who sleeved the mind of a rapist murderer into the body of a snake. Even the random little girl who spoke to Kovacs at the Battle of Stronghold museum, telling him, “Mom said grudges are stupid. She said you had to let them go or else it would kill your soul.”

“The truth is, big brother, I did it all for you,” Reileen tells a shocked Kovacs. Like every single other thing in Altered Carbon, the truth apparently wears a couple different faces before it dies completely.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.